Carlos Adames is placing a humongous target on the chin of Julian Williams. This Saturday night, at the Armory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the two will square off with Adames placing his WBC middleweight interim title on the line.

Although Williams has snagged a few big-time wins and once reigned over the junior middleweight division as a unified champion, a number of lackluster outings and a somewhat shaky chin has left Adames confident that he’ll inflict major damage with both hands.

Williams though, doesn't believe that Adames' violent threats are pertinent at this very moment. As their showdown draws near, Williams grows tired of answering questions surrounding Adames’ persistent inquiry of his ability to take a punch. During a recent discussion, Williams shifted roles from interviewee to interviewer. With the microphone in his hands now, Williams began uncorking his own series of questions and is patiently waiting for Adames to answer.

“He thinks that when he hits me the fight is gonna be over,” said Williams to BoxingScene.com. “What happens when he hits me and the fight is not over? And I hit him back and he starts gassing out like he normally do. What’s gonna happen then?”

Adames, 29, has been incredibly consistent since moving up in weight in 2021. With four consecutive checkmarks in the win column, including three of those four coming via knockout, the Dominican native believes that everything is coming together at just the right time.

Williams, somewhat similarly, has been going through a cathartic feeling. Following back-to-back defeats against nondescript opposition, Williams (28-3-1, 16 KOs) shoved away the weight scale and decided that his career would be better off at 160 pounds. So far so good, as the former unified 154-pound titlist won essentially every second of every round in his middleweight debut against Rolando Wenceslao Mansilla in November of 2022.

Ecstatic to be back on the winning track, Williams isn’t letting his latest victory go completely to his head. Although in years past the 33-year-old has hurled out menacing words in his foe’s direction and spent most of the build-up engaging in nonstop trash talk, Williams is now a seasoned veteran and considers those back-and-forth engagements as extraneous. More than anything, Williams isn’t interested in bloviating when his fists can and will do all the talking for him.

“My performance is gonna say everything.”